There is nothing bad per se about suggesting that e.g. Douglas R. Hofstadter should be the king of the nonconformist tribe.
Disagreed. IMO, there should only be kings if there’s a good reason… among other things, I suspect that status differences are epistemologically harmful. See Stanley Milgram’s research and the Asch conformity experiment.
I also disagree with the rest of your analysis. I anticipate a different sense of internal revulsion when someone starts talking to me about why Sun Myung Moon is super great vs why Mike Huckabee is so great or why LeBron James is so great. In the case of LW, I think people whose intuitions say “cult” are correct to a small degree… LW does seem a tad insular, groupthink-ish, and cultish to me, though it’s still one of my favorite websites. And FWIW, I would prefer that people who think LW seems cultish help us improve (by contributing intelligent dissent and exposing us to novel outside thinking) instead of writing us off.
(The most charitable interpretation of the flaws I see in LW is that they are characteristics that trade off against some other things we value. E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we’d get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality… not clear whether this would be good or not, though I’m leaning towards it being good. A less charitable interpretation is that the length of the sequences produces some kind of hazing effect. Personally, I haven’t finished the sequences, don’t intend to, think they’re needlessly verbose, and would like to see them compressed.)
E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we’d get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality… not clear whether this would be good or not, though I’m leaning towards it being good.
I’ve recently been subject to sloppy criticism of “weird ideas” (e.g. transhumanism) and the sloppy criticism is always the same. At this point I’d look forward to high-quality criticism, but I’m not willing to suffer again and again through the sloppy parts for it.
If people want to provide high-quality criticism, they should be rewarded for it (in this case, with upvotes and polite conversation). Sloppy criticism remains low-quality content and should not be rewarded.
Makes sense. I still think the bar should be a bit lower for criticism, for a couple reasons.
Motivated reasoning means that we’ll look harder for flaws in a critical piece, all else equal. So our estimation of post quality is biased.
Good disagreement is more valuable than good agreement, because it’s more likely to cause valuable updates. But the person writing a post can only give a rough estimate of its quality before posting it. (Dunning-Kruger effect, unknown unknowns, etc.) Intuitively their subconscious will make some kind of “expected social reward” calculation that looks like
Because of human tendencies, social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticism is going to be higher than the corresponding social_punishment_for_sloppy_agreement parameter in the corresponding equation for agreement.
If social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticism is decreased, on, the margin, that will increase the expected values of this calculation, which means that more quality criticism will get through and be posted. LW users will infer these penalties by observing voting behavior on the posts they see, so it makes sense to go a bit easy on sloppy critical posts from a counterfactual perspective. Different users will interpret social reward/punishment differently, with some much more risk-averse than others. My guess is that the most common mechanism by which low expected social reward will manifest itself is procrastination on writing the post… I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of high-quality critical pieces of LW that haven’t been written yet because their writer is procrastinating due to an ugh field around possible rejection.
(I know intelligent people will disagree with me on this, so I thought I’d make my reasoning a bit more formal/explicit to give them something to attack.)
Disagreed. IMO, there should only be kings if there’s a good reason… among other things, I suspect that status differences are epistemologically harmful. See Stanley Milgram’s research and the Asch conformity experiment.
I also disagree with the rest of your analysis. I anticipate a different sense of internal revulsion when someone starts talking to me about why Sun Myung Moon is super great vs why Mike Huckabee is so great or why LeBron James is so great. In the case of LW, I think people whose intuitions say “cult” are correct to a small degree… LW does seem a tad insular, groupthink-ish, and cultish to me, though it’s still one of my favorite websites. And FWIW, I would prefer that people who think LW seems cultish help us improve (by contributing intelligent dissent and exposing us to novel outside thinking) instead of writing us off.
(The most charitable interpretation of the flaws I see in LW is that they are characteristics that trade off against some other things we value. E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we’d get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality… not clear whether this would be good or not, though I’m leaning towards it being good. A less charitable interpretation is that the length of the sequences produces some kind of hazing effect. Personally, I haven’t finished the sequences, don’t intend to, think they’re needlessly verbose, and would like to see them compressed.)
I’ve recently been subject to sloppy criticism of “weird ideas” (e.g. transhumanism) and the sloppy criticism is always the same. At this point I’d look forward to high-quality criticism, but I’m not willing to suffer again and again through the sloppy parts for it.
If people want to provide high-quality criticism, they should be rewarded for it (in this case, with upvotes and polite conversation). Sloppy criticism remains low-quality content and should not be rewarded.
Makes sense. I still think the bar should be a bit lower for criticism, for a couple reasons.
Motivated reasoning means that we’ll look harder for flaws in a critical piece, all else equal. So our estimation of post quality is biased.
Good disagreement is more valuable than good agreement, because it’s more likely to cause valuable updates. But the person writing a post can only give a rough estimate of its quality before posting it. (Dunning-Kruger effect, unknown unknowns, etc.) Intuitively their subconscious will make some kind of “expected social reward” calculation that looks like
Because of human tendencies,
social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticismis going to be higher than the correspondingsocial_punishment_for_sloppy_agreementparameter in the corresponding equation for agreement.If
social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticismis decreased, on, the margin, that will increase the expected values of this calculation, which means that more quality criticism will get through and be posted. LW users will infer these penalties by observing voting behavior on the posts they see, so it makes sense to go a bit easy on sloppy critical posts from a counterfactual perspective. Different users will interpret social reward/punishment differently, with some much more risk-averse than others. My guess is that the most common mechanism by which low expected social reward will manifest itself is procrastination on writing the post… I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of high-quality critical pieces of LW that haven’t been written yet because their writer is procrastinating due to an ugh field around possible rejection.(I know intelligent people will disagree with me on this, so I thought I’d make my reasoning a bit more formal/explicit to give them something to attack.)
A good solution could be to just not downvote sloppy criticism. No reward, but also no punishment.